Good to see. Zagat's had problems finding a great business model in the digital world. They've gone through ads, memberships and endless partnerships. Zagat is still the prestige name in local reviews though. This is a great resource for Google's efforts in the local business market.

I love Zagat's core business idea ‚Ä" they were a significant inspiration for our LA Life neighborhood ratings. In fact, I've been looking at opportunities to do similar capsule reviews but creating them using existing reviews from other sites instead of survey data. I have to think this is where they're moving now as a part of Google, but it's not like I'm a Google VP.

This all seems to make sense. The Thomas Bros. map books were ubiquitous in California when I was growing up but have basically been replaced with Google Maps. Now the old burgundy Zagat guidebook is going this way. Glad to see Tim and Nina and their team will have a guiding hand in its replacement.

Keep digging that moat, Google. As has been the case throughout history, the guy with the biggest moat wins, right? Oh wait, nope, that's not it. It's the guy who figures out how to bypass the moat who wins.

Google, please go back to innovating. People like you because you do new and exciting things, not because you have your hand in every business sector. Giant acquisitions like this and MoMo help nobody.

I hope Google can maintain the quality of the Zagat ratings while simultaneously making them freely available ‚Ä" presumably this will be used to compete with Yelp, and I'm hopeful that it'll be useful.

It's important to note that these things are common in the private equity world, not the angel investment or venture capital world. The VC world has totally different tricks, like 3x participating preferred, "independent" board members, collusion, and option pools.

Also, if the PE firm is using a 20% discount rate to evaluate the merits of vendor finance, they are likely fooling themselves more than they are fooling the founders.

So, what's the best solution here? To pay $39 and buy "Private Equity Secrets Revealed" eBook or to hire a seasoned lawyer? And then, how much are you going to end up paying the lawyer? Are the lawyers going to pull the same tricks on you as well?

Brad Feld's blog should be the first thing you read if you get a term sheet (or even better - if you start trying to raise $). He helps explain these things in plain english and what they look like in lawyer terms as well.

This is fantastic, but "1080p" can have a dramatic range of qualities. If Inglorious Bastards just fits on the 2GB card and is over 2 hours long then the bitrate will be around 2Mbit/s, which is probably not very good. (cf. ~25Mbit/s for BluRay).

I should also point out that depending on the quality of the encoder, the bitrate is also a bad way of measuring quality. But I believe it is more useful than just saying "1080p".

it'd be interesting to see these heatmaps in some sort of normalized way. for example, 'e' is the most common letter in english, so its the most commonly used letter in these programming languages. it'd be very interesting to see, for example, this heatmap with the intensities divided by each letter's frequency of use in the English language, or across a large set of data including a lot of different programming languages

4 of my haskell files put into heatmap. One of them is an applicative-functor-style use of attoparsec, which tends to have more punctuation than normal haskell code. Even with the frequent use of :'s, $'s and ()'s, the alphanumeric keystrokes dominate the input.

This just graphically displays what I whine about most of the time. Why does my pinky has to do most the work? My pinky is pretty short and all the pinky movements are awkward. It considerably slows down my code typing speed.

I wonder If there would be another keyboard layout specially made for programmers. If you look at it you'll see that most of it has a similar pattern.

I looked at the heatmaps, then looked at my keyboard. The keys with rubbed out labels nearly match his findings 100%. My 'N' isn't (only because the key is slightly larger than my other keys). Other than that, he is spot on.

Maybe I should do something like that instead of software! What about the cheese market in the United States? Americans are branching out more and more from the limited kinds made here, so it seems like a worthwhile business venture might be to start making some of the European kinds we import.

Apart from whether or not this is fair, I really hate the EU taking any part in this. I know their authority is not well-defined, but in my view they are overreaching. I've flipped from pro-EU to anti-EU on my voting agenda.

It would be interesting if for new laws, there were some sort of judicial opinion that could state to their best of their ability what the purpose of the law was.

i.e. Some legislators write a law, then pass it to a panel of judges, the judges attach a note indicating what they determined the purpose of the law was, and then the law went on for a vote. The opinion wouldn't have any legal effect, but it might provide for a bit more honesty.

Does the legal justification for copyright differ in the EU vs the USA? In the USA, the nominal basis is to give a creator a monopoly over reproduction for a time, to encourage that creator to make more.

I have little insight into the security of your software, but I hope you have also considered the peculiarities of Bitcoin. To name just one thing that would be far harder in a normal market: open a Bitcoinica account, deposit $10 000, buy $50 000 in Bitcoin, sell BTC really expensively at Mt Gox as the system frantically tries to rebalance. Given the volatility of BTC, this may be profitable even if[1] you subsequently abandon the Bitcoinica account (which is likely to hold $-40 000 in dollars and less than $40 000 in BTC at un-spiked prices...)

[1] EDIT: Actually, it's only profitable if you can get the Bitcoinica account into the red. But given enough ability to move the market, that's definitely possible.

The site looks great! However, what I'd really love to see in a platform is not advance trading features, but an easy way to convert USD to BTC and vice versa. I realize that this is a real challenge given the anonymity provided by the Bitcoin network and the only real instant transfer of money is through credit cards (which like to chargeback). If someone would solve this problem, you have a winner.

I'm the creator of Bitcoinica. I'm not so established here. To be honest, I'm only 17.

Please try it out. (I can pay $1 for you if you're not willing/able to deposit, email me at info@bitcoinica.com. :-D ) You can leave any suggestions, comments, bug reports and feature requests here. I'll look through every single comment. Thanks!

Microsoft's revenue from royalties HTC is forced to pay on each Android phone it sells is estimated to be between three and five times the company's Windows Phone revenue, which could help explain why Microsoft has been so quiet to date when it comes to marketing its new mobile OS

I think the more important statistic is the profit Microsoft makes per Android device, compared with the profit per WindowPhone device. There are far more Android devices, so it's not surprising they make more from that "licensing" agreement (I'm loath to call it that when it's more like extortion). I find it hard to believe that MS would prefer (and make more money from) an Android dominated market compared to a WP7 dominated one, so I'm pretty skeptical of the idea that MS are holding back on WP7 because they don't mind Android dominating. I could be wrong though, maybe their Android licences really are that lucrative, and in that case God help us all because the software(-patent) industry is even more fucked than most of us ever imagined.

I think it's embarrassing for Microsoft to make more from bogus patents than from their own actual product. If I were them I wouldn't try to brag about it in the press. Heck, if I were them I probably wouldn't even do it in the first place.

This is why Microsoft have lost their way. Instead of focusing on their own products and innovation, they try to make money through other less honorable means. And sadly it runs deep into Microsoft's corporate culture.

Their actions as of late are making me reconsider whether I will want to use any of their new products in the future. They should realize that a lot of those Android users are also potential Microsoft customers for other products of theirs (desktop Windows, Xbox, Office, etc). They shouldn't try to piss them off with stuff like this, by extorting money from other of their favorite companies, especially when the way they do it is highly questionable.

I love that you're going after a market so ripe for disruption, appreciate your coming to Hacker News for feedback/community, and I wish you the best.

But I think you have it backwards...

The real problem is not the time spent in the supermarket, it's getting there and back. You're addressing the wrong issue.

Many people want their groceries delivered for all kind of reasons:

- They have small children they don't want to take with them. - Weather. - Traffic. - Health issues, elderly, shut-ins, etc. - They don't have a car. - They work and can only go the same time as everyone else who works.

On the other hand, if they are going to the trouble of driving all the way to the supermarket, then they might as well go inside:

- to examine and choose their own produce - to examine and choose their own meat - to examine and choose specials (which can be done well on-line) - to handle and compare similar items - to consult with the butcher/deli manager/etc.

The negative attitude of employees you cite in your video has never been an issue for me. The only real issue has been the check-out lines: there are never enough, the lines are too long, and they are expensive to operate.

If you are seeking large amounts of investment, why don't you just attack the real problem: getting out of the supermarket without waiting in line. All the necessary technology is already available. I just want to fill my cart and go home.

Please don't become another Webvan. Take that money and leverage current technology to eliminiate check-out lines in existing supermarkets forever. That's what people really want.

We don't need more infrastructure. We need better use of technology in existing infrastructure.

Bar codes dragged us that industry into the 20th century. RFID can drag it into the 21st.

- You need physical stores. These take a lot of money and expertise to set up and run. And to expand/scale in any meaningful way will take a LOT of money. Plus of course you've got the added expense of having to actually do the shopping on behalf of your customers (ie walk round your inventory and fill the basket). Kind of the opposite to the Ikea model. As Ryan Air have conclusively proved, people will put up with ANYTHING if it's cheap(er).

- Your stores are going to have to be as big as a supermarket to really be of use to people.

And on the competition side:

- What's the advantage over just ordering my goods online from a supermarket? I don't even need to go to the store then, they just get delivered to my front door. Or do supermarkets not do this in the US? IN the UK at any rate you can choose very specific delivery times as well.

And on the marketing side:

- 40 minutes in a grocery store? You can easily spend this much time online filling up your basket. Personally I've never felt that online ordering has saved me much time. The USP of online shopping is not time saving, it's "when" saving - I can do it during a quiet time at work for example. But with Ernies I still gotta go pick it up...

- 73 hours per year? Doesn't sound like much to me. And walking round the store is healthier than sitting in front of your PC :)

We are actively seeking additional investors to help us open our first location. We have commitments from local investors that have us 25% towards our fundraising goal. I have yet to seriously pitch any investors outside the mid-south, which is one of my reasons for posting here on HN. I would dearly love to give my brief investor pitch to anyone seriously interested in the concept.

The consumer value proposition is covered in the video linked above. The business value prop boils down to this: double-digit net margins. Seriously.

This is a good concept for poorer areas in the United States. Delivery services are good in New York, but where I am from, the pizza delivery guy gets killed for $10(google it). Also, in poorer areas of the country people have a lot of kids. When I go grocery shopping I see probably 10-20 young girls with multiple kids. I would be happier if they used an Ernies like service so that I can grocery shop in peace. Also it seems like it would nice for them to not have to leave the car and just get a bunch of groceries. Not sure I would use this though.

Now to make this really profitable, you need to be able to accept food stamps and have a slick mobile application. Everyone has a smart phone. Some of my friends have no computer, but use their phone for the internet. A handful of those friends are on government entitlement programs. It seems like this could be a nice thing to offer them especially if you got deals on groceries.

I hope you manage to run with this. I'm sick of wasting so much time in the grocery store and I've been willing to pay to avoid it for a while now. Of course, there are some requirements:

Excellent interface. I have to be able to browse your selection as easily as I can browse in a store. This means I can find things I didn't intend to find. (That's good for you and me, both.)

Fast service at the curb. There's no point in saving the time inside the store if I just waste it sitting in the parking lot.

Reliable time estimates. (Actually, this dove-tails with the last one, doesn't it?)

Selection. I know you said you have selection, but I've yet to find 2 stores that had the same selection. I'm not terribly set on brands, but it does matter sometimes.

Stock. As in, things had better be in stock. Nothing makes me angrier than when the store is out of something I need. Yes, not even long lines.

Deli/Bakery/etc. When you've just dealt with a shopping trip, you don't feel like cooking that night. Bringing home something delicious and/or hot is a must.

And you should seriously consider delivery, and not just curb-side. I know it's a logistical nightmare, but it eliminates 2 of the things above quite neatly.

I also love the possibilities for the store itself. Because the customer never enters the store, all the standard storefront stuff is eliminated. You can use portable tablet registers to let the customer pay, and standard shopping carts are eliminated. You can use whatever is most efficient, or even invent something to make it better. And you can start off with people plucking things from shelves, but it may become economical to have robots doing that. (I believe Amazon does that, but they're pretty big and centralized.)

In short, do it right and you'll make me (and a lot of other people) really happy.

I like the concept. My wife used to work for plumgood food in nashville and the infrastructure build out seemed really expensive... seems like you may be able to avoid that with this if you partner with a local grocery store so you don't have to manage inventory. I would start there and put all my focus on creating a killer shopping experience online-- there are a lot of intangibles of just cruising through a grocery store that have to be rethought when you take it online. Best of luck!

I think this works well for processed foods and non-perishible items, but I see a real problem with meat and produce.

Shoppers are accustomed to doing their own quality control when shopping for fresh items. In a real grocery store it takes real effort to choose the best meat and produce from what's available, and that decision might just be to not purchase something. Do you intend to provide this as part of your service? If so, what controls will you have in place to guarantee quality?

Here in Montreal (perhaps also in other large cities) I can order groceries online from any of the major supermarkets and have them delivered to me (mind you, I don't have a car) for a reasonable minimum order value and a mere $2-3 extra. Maybe you are intentionally not targetting these cities, otherwise the idea is not really new at all.

You want to see a grumpy clerk? Go to Switzerland and forget to put the little sticker on your bags of produce. Damn.

I'll be honest, I'm skeptical. And I'm sure investors are skeptical too after spectacular failures like WebVan and Kozmo.

Sure these sites were different than what you are trying to accomplish (Online --> Deliver to your door vs Online-->Pickup at local store), but they still have similar problems. Groceries operate at razor-thin margins, and being a warehouse of food will only take you so far (just ask WebVan). How do you know if your "Ernies" associate will pick a ripe apple vs a bruised one? How can Ernies be "friendly" if all the interaction is ordering online/pickup at the store?

The biggest question for me is, what is to stop the competition from implementing this if it sees initial success? Order online --> Pick up at store already exists for many types of businesses, if Meijer or Publix or Acme Grocery co sees success, they'll probably add this to their options, at a much easier cost than you will (as they will already have retail stores). What competitive advantage can you use that can fight against this?

I'm at work, and so don't really want to watch the video, so I'm going to ask directly:

What does this give me over Ocado (or their many many many competitors - I mean, Asda deliver?!), who I order from, and then they deliver? This sounds like it just adds an extra step of my having to show up, rather than just agreeing that I'll be sat at home in my PJs watching Jeremy Kyle at the right time...

Here in Miami we have these drive through convenience stores called Farm Stores. They just recently rolled out FarmStores.com which lets you order online, then schedule a pickup, and roll through and get your stuff. Very convenient, the $5 service charge I could do without, but still convenient.

The concept of only having a limited set of distribution/pickup points makes a ton of sense, much cheaper than home delivery. You are effectively offloading 2/3 of the delivery cost to the customer themselves.

It's a location thing. A number of stores have tried this by me, but only one has really pulled it off. People often use it for their big family orders that are well upwards of $100. In general, the place also has better prices than other stores. There are repeat customers, but shopping online certainly doesn't account for the majority of their grocery store runs. That said, the place constantly has a line of cars with huge orders being loaded into their trunks. Never small orders.

Make sure you're in an area that's largely populated by families, and make sure your prices are already good.

You might consider hitting up Angel List if you haven't done so already. If you're trying to raise for that first store - "proof of concept" before you go after more funds - it seems that might be a good avenue to raise those funds. Good luck to you!

Edit: it will probably help a lot that you've already got a portion committed, btw.

I like it. One think to take into consideration is people's relationship with food. It's going to be a hard sell for some people to buy produce or meat sight unseen when selection can have a huge effect on quality.

That being said I think you could build a really interesting interface. Also tremendous overhead savings, no cashiers, baggers, carts, storefront. Basically just a refrigerated warehouse and limited staff.

This is pretty cool! It's nice to see some good work being done on this general reconfigurable stuff.

For an interesting but only tangentially related product, I've been playing with one of these http://rtds.com/index/index.html this week. It's an FPGA driven simulator specialized for power grid stuff. It is fast and quite fun. It allows general programming within the domain, but not true general purpose stuff. I'm sure similar technologies exist for other fields and I was thinking "Someone has to be generalizing this right?". It's nice to see that thought being done here.

Fun fact for startup people: the company is tiny headcount wise but has quite a large market penetration -- it's a good testament to what a passionate, dedicated and highly skilled team can do when they get to it.

If you are into high performance reconfigurable computing you might be interested in some of the work being done by the CHREC group. Here is a list of there recent papers:http://www.chrec.org/chrecpapers.html

Wall clock time alone isn't such a useful metric to compare CPU vs. FPGA. It would be more meaningful to normalize by machine cost (initial investment and operating costs). (Software development/non-portability is a separate discussion.)

Looked at facebook just now, and sure enough there in the footer (if you're fast enough to click on it before the infinite scroll kicks in) they have this http://www.facebook.com/full_data_use_policy, which reaffirms my suspicion that using only what the author suggests probably isn't quite as safe legally.

That said, I definitely agree that putting a simpler layer on top of it so non-lawyers can get the gist of your policy quickly is a great idea - now item 1,000,001 on my startup's to-do list!

The article is assuming that the ToS and privacy statement is meant to be informative. It's not.

If you give people a good overview of what you are doing with their data, a significant portion will get pissed off. If you bore them with legalese, 99.9% of them will just sign, rather than wade through the terms.

As long as we have a sue-happy society, companies will use privacy policies to limit liability. That means they will continue to be documents with more text than most of us are likely to read. Icons and diagrams won't work without the text behind them. However, I do agree that just because a document has legal significance does not mean it needs to be full of legalese. We tried to keep our privacy policy as short and light as possible and write it in plain language. http://nodeping.com/PrivacyPolicy

I recently wrote a privacy policy for my new startup; I think it complies with all but two of those guidelines (lightbox and standardised). Any feedback would be appreciated: https://theescortcompanion.com/privacy/

SECURITY WARNING: do not use this module! Scroll down for more information in the discussion. This module disables a major part of kernel memory protection and trusts user provided file names to be valid. This makes it possible for an UNPRIVILEGED USER to do bad things.

These problems are, of course, fixable someone may fix it.

Bonus points for whoever fixes the problems and submits a pull request. All the info you need is in this discussion thread.

Really, sad. But his legacy lives on in one of the finest projects on the internet. It's provided me and my family with countless hours of enjoyment and immensely lowered the cost of ownership of my Kindle.

Imagine my wonderful surprise when I found not just one, but an entire library of Oz and Edgar Rice Burroughs novels that I quickly disseminated to all of the youngsters in my extended family ... then watched them spend hours entertained by these century old tails of fantasy and adventure.

No project has proven more firmly that our modern endless extensions to copyright is hopelessly wrong headed.

Michael Hart was a fantastic guy to know back in the early 90s as the Internet was transforming from a research network into a popular phenomenon. He'd foreseen this eventuality in the late 70s and made Project Gutenberg in part so it would be there when the world needed it. I'll always remember Michael rollerblading through Champaign-Urbana in his trademark ruby spandex singlet. And his incredible ability to scrounge computer parts. He once invited me to drive through the night to score an obsolete supercomputer that was allegedly sitting beside a dumpster at the University of Minnesota. He wanted to get to those hard drives before the rain did. Sadly, I turned him down - I had a first date that night. I don't remember her name. But I'll always remember Michael. And miss him.

Five years ago I was at HOPE Number Six and Michael Hart was the Saturday keynote speaker, giving a talk on his work at Project Gutenberg. ¬†I didn't know very much about it, but I recognized the name. ¬†There were Project Gutenberg discs floating around the conference so I snagged one and had a look.

I don't really remember anything specific from the talk, but I remember it was inspiring. ¬†It was called¬†"Using eBooks to Break Down the Bars of Ignorance and Illiteracy". ¬†There's audio of the talk online, and I think I need to hear it again.

The next day was the last day of the conference, and as was usual Jello Biafra was the getting far less attention than the other keynote speakers. ¬†They'd closed off the back part of the main hall, a hall which had been filled to capacity and then some for Michael, and some of us were tossing around beach balls. ¬†I pounded one particularly hard and hit some guy in the back of the head with it. ¬†When he turned around I recognized Michael. ¬†I don't think he was too happy with me in that moment.

With the eloquence that only a twenty year old can muster, I stuck my hand out and said "I love your work. ¬†It's fucking absurd." ¬†That's about the highest compliment I can give a person, and I'm glad to see that Shaw quote in the obituary. ¬†It says what I was awkwardly trying to express.

The tension drained out of the situation, and he shook my hand before turning back to his companion and returning to his conversation. ¬†I went back to playing with beach balls.

I admire what Michael built, and I admire how he did it. ¬†Project Gutenberg was slow but steady, and will continue past his death. ¬†I can only aspire to leaving that kind of a legacy.

"Reasonable people adapt themselves to the world. Unreasonable people attempt to adapt the world to themselves. All progress, therefore, depends on unreasonable people."

I really like this quote. I discovered Gutenberg looking for something to read on the train pre-ebooks days. I really got sick of having to take books so I wanted a way to get books onto my PalmIII. [0] Searching around for anything in text format I stumbled onto Gutenberg. How do you get the text into the palm in a readable format? Using open source software like Plkr. [1] If you ran Linux the morning routine would go something like this:

* plkr client would crawl various web sites I read, compress the pages & sync with the pilot.

* read on the train.

I'd make this morning/evening habit. I benefited from Harts vision for many years.

"My father read an assortment of these made available to him by Cambridge University in England for several months in a glass room constructed for the purpose. To the best of my knowledge he read ALL those available. . .in great detail. . .and determined from the various changes, that Shakespeare most likely did not write in nearly as many of a variety of errors we credit him for, even though he was in/famous for signing his name with several different spellings." [2]

Hart was certainly well read. You can open random classics like Macbeth & find his comments like this one in the forward of Macbeth.

I suppose many would consider this both indecorous and perverse, but I really am curious about the cause of death in cases such as these. It is usually omitted in cases of suicide or some particularly nuanced, possibly embarrassing disease.

I don't care about specifics, I am just disturbed when all reports tiptoe around the cause of death as if it just "spontaneously" happened to a man who was merely 64.

It sounds from some of his recent public writings like he may have been struggling with a terminal disease, but not being an associate of his, I have no way of knowing that.

Excerpt from interview:RP: Do you get a salary from the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, which was founded, I believe, in 2000? MH: No. We don't attract enough funding for that. RP: So what do you live on today? MH: It's been two years since my last pay check, but if you save all your salary when you do get one, $100,000 will go 10 years with no salary, at $10,000 a year.

Interesting that he lived so cheaply in order to work on something he loved.

I saw a wonderful talk at HOPE 6 concerning Project Gutenberg, and can only assume it was Michael Hart speaking. It made me donate on the spot.

As a staunch supporter of paper books I don't often read eBooks, but I can completely understand and appreciate what an immense resource they are to those less fortunate (and picky about their medium!) than I am. Rest in Peace, Mr. Hart. Your legacy will live for years and years to come.

I remember going to a dual-talk in Amsterdam of Michael Hart and Richard Stallman. I went to see Stallman, I returned energized by Hart's vision. He was a convincing visionary person that dedicated is life to the good of all people.

I submit this not because of the story it tells (which, while breaking my heart, is clearly off-topic for Hacker News) but for the presentation.

The New York Times does a terrific job when it comes to presenting information. They could have just embedded a standard audio player but they did not. They present the audio in a way that makes it accessible even if you have little time. It's possible to skip around effortlessly and you never lose sight of the big picture. They are also not shy to use new web technologies when possible. This particular page works on my iPad without a hitch.

This is one of many examples where the New York Times really shows that they are able to find new and better ways of presenting information.

I am so overloaded with 9/11 coverage I don't even want to click it. Really looking forward to Monday, 9/12, so I can go back to the old life, where I am only reminded of the impact of 9/11 two or three times a week, instead of two or three times a day.

This is the type of service that really brings the benefit of computing to the masses. Sure, everyone consumes on the internet, but something like this lets everyone experience the joy programmers feel when they make a computer do what they want.

A tip for Kindle owners: you can make an ifttt pipeline that sends RSS entries to Instapaper. Then on Instapaper's end, set up automated Kindle delivery. Presto, new posts from your favorite bloggers are now on your Kindle, entirely automatically.

Nice site. Some thoughts:- The fonts are way too big. On my 13 inch screen it feels as if the site is constantly screaming at me.- How does the phone trigger work? I suppose it gets triggered when a call comes in. Do you port the number or how else would you know that a phone call comes in?

To be honest, I still have a hard time figuring out how, where or why I would ever use this. Maybe I'm just too old, too disconnected, or too stupid to understand what it's all about, but in short, I just don't.

I'd love a single, simple, concrete example of a relevant problem this solves.

Don't get me wrong, I have no doubt it's very cool and very clever. I just really don't get it.

I go through Zite, Flipboard and Hacker News every morning and queue up all the interesting articles. Buffer posts them for me at set times throughout the day. I don't have to be at my computer to tweet and I don't flood my followers early in the morning.

great service - already can see so many possibilities. One problem I ran into : the craigslist search result URL I'm trying isn't being recognized http://montreal.fr.craigslist.ca/muc/Add a bug reporting feature !

Impressed! The only issue I have is with the lack of information about their real-world presence. Who are Linden, Jesse, and Alexander? Privacy policies alone don't exactly solve the issue of instilling trust.

Really cool service. I signed up for Instapaper yesterday for the sole reason that they send read-it-later stuff to Kindle. So I created an ifttt to send my Pinboard bookmarks tagged "instapaper" to Instapaper. So I can now get only articles that I choose on my Kindle :) Sw33t

The only thing I'm worried about is giving away so many passwords to one service. How are these stored?

One question though: what, if anything, does ifttt do to detect/prevent infinite loops? If I create a task to copy new photos added to flickr to instragram, and another task to copy new photos added to instagram to flickr, what happens?

This is a cool service - maybe I need to RTFM or the comments, but is there an API by which we can add / modify / delete tasks? Is there a way that third parties can use / embed this in their own apps?

Nice tool. The Enterprise version can be targeted to operations types, you know "if <new employee> then <run through checklist>" "if <mail errors> then <shoot exchange server in the head>" kinds of things :-)

I really like the idea of ifttt, it's like the pipeline for web, the problem of this service is the latency is unbearable. I created a few tasks to notify me the rss updates, it may takes more than 30 mins to send me the notification through jabber, I use notify.me as well, it always comes first.

This site is super great, been using for a little bit to automatically add anything I tag 'read' on delicious to my instapaper queue.

It would be awesome if there was an output to GET/POST to an arbitrary URL. Although, I suppose it sort of opens up a bigger issue, as to make it really useful for integrating with a lot of other arbitrary APIs, you'd probably need a way to support oauth from arbitrary services as well.

What an incredible idea! This can become even more valuable if ifttt can open its platform to enable outside developers to create and distribute custom action blocks and triggers for end users (like an app store of ifttt triggers and action blocks).

Furthermore, I can see this transitioning into "phsyical" applications (think "The Internet of Things"). For example, OnStar can connect car sensors to send a text message when your car leaves your garage.

Really cool idea, and nice site design except for one glaring thing- the size of everything! What the hell!? Is this designed for the legally blind? There isn't even an option in the settings to make things normal-sized... Fix it!

Congrats, this is really impressive. Hopefully I'll have some free time in the next few months to try it out. Never used Forth before, so I might give it a bit of a go sometime soon. Any good further resources other than the wiki page?